


Holding Pattern

by frangipani



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Pining, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 05:30:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6271627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frangipani/pseuds/frangipani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the right choices don't feel right. Or Mara Jade does not deal well with feelings.</p><p>Canon played with fast and loose. Borrowed quotes/timeline from The Thrawn Trilogy, Darksaber,  The New Rebellion, and Vision of the Future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holding Pattern

I.

In the solitude of her room, while she looks out at the sparkling lights of the Imperial City, it dawns on Mara. _I left the Jedi academy and I won’t come back_.

The hand on the transparisteel window clenches into a fist. She is right to have made that decision, knows it in her bones. Skywalker is in over his head, too enamoured with his star student to realize in what precarious position he’d put his adepts. Kyp Durron will fall, this she’d known since he jerked up in the mess hall, hurling invectives at them for not using their Jedi powers to crush Daala.

Outside, the vehicles move in predictable patterns. Mara usually likes the view, finds it soothing, but tonight she can’t stop thinking.

He will fall and Skywalker--

Not her problem. She’d had enough experience with the dark to bear the marks. She would have no part of it. Not even for Skywalker.

Mara almost misses the bickering between Solo and Calrissian. While she thought it obnoxious at the time, it gave her some respite from the dread slinking into her bit by bit.

He shouldn’t have put her in that position. Shouldn’t have devoted so much time and effort on some upstart kid, had he turned to her instead maybe she wouldn’t feel so powerless--

No.

A small tremble has been building from the base of her spine. 

Impulsively, she grabs a cloak and leaves her quarters. The cantina is in a seedy area of Coruscant where no one is likely to recognize her. She sits at a booth and orders an ale. The hubbub around her is a pleasant enough distraction. The ale takes just the right amount of edge off. 

She picks off various patrons, idly guessing their trades and inclinations like haphazardly putting and taking apart puzzle pieces. Her eye stops at a man standing at the bar, mechanic by the look of it. There’s something simple about him that keeps her riveted.

He catches her looking at him and returns her gaze not with a leer or wink, those she could have batted away just as she did Calrissian, but with frank matter-of-factness that wrests the air from her lungs. She wonders if he’d smell like petrol and metal.

She ducks her head and leaves a credit chip on the table. He’s following her, blatantly enough that her danger sense does not so much as twinge. 

Old habits die hard though and it’s close to an ambush the way she springs on him once he’s in the ‘fresher. He’d not expected such an onslaught, but he adapts, bearing her weight when she wraps her legs around his waist. He takes her half propped up on the lavatory, her fingers digging into his shoulder hard enough to make him hiss. Mara bites her lip to avoid giving voice to the mantra of imsorryimsorry that’s building up in her chest. He does smell like petrol and metal, not like moss and rainwater. It matters.

After, the sanisteam doesn’t seem enough, and she promises herself she’ll never do it again.

II.

Mara picks up Skywalker up among the debris of the _Eye of Palpatine_ above Belsavis. She and Organa Solo half carry him from the shuttle’s lock to the _Hunter’s Luck_. He’s gaunt and pale, face mottled with bruises and cuts. One perfunctory scan of his leg is enough to make her stomach turn. He’s lucky he’s still alive. But the eyes are what strike her, there’s raw grief there, the depths of which is unlike anything she’s ever seen in his face before. 

She’s not quite sure what happened. In spite of herself, she thinks she should ask. She will ask. Before she can, Solo announces there’s another escape pod. She runs to bring that back too and rushes back to the hold.

Skywalker’s helping a woman with short blonde hair sit and even from where Mara stands, she sees the reverence in his touch. Second by second, the longer he stares at the woman, something in him glimmers. The haunted look vanishes until there’s just that glow, behind the dark circles under his eyes, the off color bruises. That light makes him almost beautiful. All the while, something cold and hard settles within Mara.

Mara goes back to her ventures, helping out the Solos had cost her too much time. Karrde suggests she see how amenable one Pietr Esk is to taking on vornskrs as a product. She tries to ignore the memories the project conjures.

_Well, you can tell him I’d be glad to serve as a reference_

Esk likes throwing lavish cocktail parties, the kind where there’s art on the walls and scantily-clad Twi’lek dancers. She has a meeting set in the first hour of her being there. No doubt due to the backless parody of a dress she’s wearing. She has to hand it to Karrde. The man knows nothing if not how to use his resources. She sits on one of the chaises with her untouched drink in her hand, surveying the crowd with a well-honed look of disinterest.

One of the guests doesn’t quite seem to fit in. He’s dressed suitably enough in black trousers and shirt. But his demeanor pings her as entirely wrong for the setting. He looks askance at the Twi’lek dancers as they undulate, refuses the drink the waiter offers him. It doesn’t take her long to get a name and an occupation. Collector, apparently specializing in exotic moss paintings. The job fits a man like that, all soft corners and careful eyes.

Mara follows him when he leaves the party -- more out of curiosity than anything else. He leaves alone, no bodyguards, no flashy entourage, and considering this is still Abregado-rae, it’s foolish. He manages to make it a couple of streets away from Esk’s building when a couple of thugs circle him. 

Mara should have let them teach him a lesson, but the odds are wrong. This kind of scholarly type doesn’t even look like the sort to understand such prosaic lessons in cause and effect. The thugs are just street toughs. Mara dispatches them easily. She barely even dirties her dress.

He’s looking at her, unruffled. 

“Some people would say thank you,” she says.

When he speaks it’s almost to himself. “I’ve been looking for someone like you.”

A fingerprint encrypted data chip containing a contract lands in her lap scarcely a week later. She laughs at first while she skims it, then wants to kick the scholar in the teeth, but by the end, she’s grudgingly intrigued. One day has started to look a lot like the next, and there’s an appealing irony in using her vast repertoire of training and knowledge like this. The contract just names the judicious application of pain. No sex unless designated by the contractee.

Mara’s not interested in sex.

Her scholar makes overtures, of course, but he doesn’t press and keeps to the firm line of her boundaries. It’s a pleasant enough diversion when the silence in her quarters starts feeling like a vise on her throat. He asks no questions and neither does she. 

III.

Mara doesn’t think of Skywalker or the Solos until her suspicions about the Hutts are all but confirmed. She should go see Organa Solo, but on impulse sets a course to Yavin 4. She’s fine. She’s busy.

_occasionally--for some unknown reason-- I almost look forward to seeing you_

It’s a disaster. 

Karrde’s hailing her to Abregado-rae again to oversee the shipments. She ends up getting into a brawl with some contractors. Her ship gets impounded, and her week and mood get worse from there. 

Back at her quarters, the elegant scrawl on flimsiplast grated on her nerves the first two times she’d come across it. She’s no obedient lapdog answering to a master’s call, no matter how floridly the invitation is written. The third, she stalks out of her lodgings crosses the city to the scholar’s luxurious apartment. Mara lets herself in, and eventually finds him in one of the spacious storage rooms, perusing one of his newly acquired paintings, dressed in his usual blacks.

She’d made no gesture to conceal her steps, and he turns once he hears her approach. The room is dim and humid, moss doesn’t take well to excess light. Something about the room and the outline of his lithe form grabs her by the throat, and just as the scholar turns she’s backhanding him so hard he goes sprawling. She straddles him as he looks on surprised.

His fingers flit across her cheek. It’s wrong. His hands are too soft. “Ma--”

She slaps him again. “Shut up.” He goes pliant and she settles around him. He’s hard, no surprise there. The wave of wrongness building up inside her gets stronger, but she doesn’t want it. Doesn’t want to think. Wants to hurt.

_Your coming to Yavin 4 is never unnecessary_

She fumbles with his pants, and yanks at her own, thinking that she hates him again. She digs her nails just under his collarbone until he cries out. She sinks into him and the angle is wrong; she’s not ready and it does hurt. Mara slides her hands under his shirt and rakes her nails down his chest, shifts her hips until she finds a rhythm. Just before the orgasm hits, she thinks she hates herself most of all.

Once she’s done, she adjusts her clothes and leaves. There’s a baroque arrangement of exotic flowers in her quarters by the time she arrives. She doesn’t need to see the flimsi to know who it’s from. She sends the data chip with the contract back by courier droid. In pieces.

IV.

There have been no nightmares after Wayland. Once in a while there’d be a flash of something disquieting, but nothing to move her. Nothing like before, when she’d wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, ice in her veins, the Emperor’s voice ripping through her mind. 

Only... she’s in a lonely street a cold wind blowing past. She walks for a few steps, there’s the sound of something cracking. She turns a corner, and there’s fire in the middle of the street. It might be some part of a ship, there’s debris strewn about. X-wing parts, she realizes belatedly. She gets as close as she can to where the fire blazes, but the heat is too much. She _feels_ that it’s Skywalker in there, that he’s dying, but she can’t--

And she does wake up drenched in sweat and shivering, a sob in her throat. When the feeling passes, Mara wishes she’d developed her skills enough to assure herself he’s alive. Instead, she’s forced to do it like everyone else, scanning the HoloNet, asking her sources. 

She would know if it were real. Wouldn't she? 

The nightmares come frequently enough that it starts to worry her. A panoply of very real horrors follows in step, genocide at Pydyr, which sends her reeling, the bombing of the Senate Hall. Through it all, the nightmares fill the space in between like a gruesome intermezzo.

So she ends up with Solo in Almania, ysalamari making the Force a faulty holoprojector, flickering in and out. In, Skywalker’s there. Out, he’s gone.

It’s not about him. For all Mara knows, at any moment, he could be dead.

And in one of those flickers of the Force, something malevolent unfurls. Mara is blasted with it like a frigid wind. She stands paralyzed in a fog of bad memories, sees Solo and his first mate become small figures in the distance. She wills her feet to move. Not for him. Not for her. 

_I’m here for the rest of us_

The Force flickers off, and move they do, finally. Mara’s running, the sound of her boots loud in the empty plaza.

Mara follows her senses until hears Organa Solo’s voice screaming Skywalker’s name. She hears Skywalker reply, then there’s the unmistakable sound of blaster fire and all goes still. The Force goes dark again and she runs harder. They’re in an alley, the Solos and Skywalker. A black cloaked figure lies prone on the floor. Mara almost sags with relief.

It’s not until Organa Solo embraces her husband that Skywalker seems to register her presence. He’s looking at her in confusion as if he can’t quite believe she’s there. He doesn’t look much better than when she’d picked him up from _The Eye_ , except with the addition of some serious burns. The Force is still dark.

“Mara?”

“Saving the galaxy again, eh?” The words come out sharper than she intended and she winces. 

His eyes unfocus and he sways on his feet. Mara gets to him a second before Organa Solo does. Mara lets him go when Solo joins his wife. She hangs back when they carry Skywalker back to the ship. They’re joined by Chewbacca and some white haired creature that slobbers over everything. Even on the verge of passing out, Skywalker manages to back Chewbacca’s insistence that they find the creature’s pack.

He spends a good portion of the trip back in a Jedi healing trance. Mara spends it regretting having come. She only hopes she can be back with Karrde’s people before he wakes.

No such luck.

“I didn’t get a chance to thank you,” he says coming over to where she’s sitting.

Mara gives him a sidelong glance. “Paying Karrde’s bill means you don’t have to.”

“Ah, right.” He nods in that easy way of his and blast it, she can’t quite stop herself. 

“And your lady? She’s good?” Mara’s braces herself for domestic contentment. This is the one thing she’s never asked her sources.

“Callista?” His face becomes shadowed. “I don’t know. She left a while back.”

He must have seen something in her expression, because he gives her a sad little smile.

Mara wonders why he didn’t follow. The woman she’d talked to a lifetime ago was a brittle thing, half a ghost from another time. Where she would have found it within herself to shake the only link she had to this time, this world, was difficult to imagine. Surely, Skywalker with his penchant for eking out victories over lost causes could have brought her back. 

Then again, it was his student dead on the sandstone.

“Sorry to hear that,” she manages.

He lowers his head. "Don't be." His words have the ring of serene Jedi master speak. “Callista has her own path.”

She nods, feigns that she has nothing more to say when there it is, scratching at her insides to get out. _I shouldn’t have left_. She squelches the words deep inside, drowns them yet again in the certainty of having made the right choice. _You gave me no choice._

She’s finally back at the _Fire_ and knows how the story’s going to going to go. Not now. In a month. In two. 

Mara’s through with lying to herself. 

A year passes. Karrde has her return to Rishi to negotiate the price of Exonium with some recalcitrant colonists. Her contact is young, a blond, with sunwashed skin and open face. He’s about Ghent’s age when she first met him, and that’s why she’s more tolerant of him than she usually is of wet behind the ears rubes. 

No, that’s not it.

“You’re lucky to leave,” the boy says as she hands him Karrde’s payment. “I hate living on this middle of nowhere planet.”

“You’re young yet,” she replies noncommittally, looking at her data pad.

“What’s it like -- out there?” he gestures to the sky.

“Big.” Mara sends a message to Karrde. When she’s done the boy is still looking at her expectantly. 

“Lonely,” she blurts out, meeting his eyes. Rishi colonists live in close family groups in the valleys--the only habitable spaces downplanet. While he’s something of a courier for now, the boy’s father is the head of the operation and unbeknownst to the boy he’s being groomed to be his second. Mara’s willing to bet the boy will feel differently soon enough. “Out there no one knows you. No one cares. You’re better off with your own people here.”

His hand dashes out to her suddenly and clutches hers. “Take me with you.”

She yanks her hand away. “I have no use for you. Neither does my boss.”

He’s sullen in a way that shows her he’d anticipated just that response. 

“Now, out.”

He shuffles his feet and stares at her for a long moment. Finally, he stammers “Would, ah, would you like some company?”

Mara crosses her arms over her chest. “That won’t convince me to take you with me.”

He blushes wildly and waves a hand. “No, no! I didn’t mean it like that. I meant...you’re attractive and I thought...Nevermind. I shouldn’t have--”

_You came out of a grubby sixth-rate farm on a tenth-rate planet, and destroyed my life ___

__Mara swallows as he continues sputtering, staring at the color steadily creeping up his cheeks. She's not lying to herself anymore. She won’t._ _

_You happened to me_

__It’s a chronic condition, and she’ll allow herself a reprieve where she finds it. Maybe someday she’ll be able to think of Skywalker without it ripping her heart into bloody chunks, but she’s never been an optimist anyway, and this is the rest of her life._ _

__She says, “Fine. Stay, if you like.”_ _

__He touches her like she’s spun glass, and while the cynic in her thinks it’s all in his hesitancy -- because hasn’t learned any other way yet-- she loses herself. Mara wraps her arms around his neck, brushing her lips against his temple. He does smell like rain and damp earth, like simplicity and goodness itself. She closes her eyes and inhales._ _

__Mara lets him undress her. They’re on the bed, her on his lap trading breathless kisses, and his hand is sure as it glides up her thigh. She tangles her fingers in his hair and pulls him to lie back with her. His hands map the jut of her pelvic bone, the ridges of her ribs, the curve of her breast. She gasps and shivers, thinks of blueleaf, seeing the bright cobalt behind her closed eyelids. She covers his hand with hers, twines her fingers with his, holds on to him like he might vanish at any minute. He slides inside her, and she angles her hips just so, pulls his mouth down to hers. In the horizon, the promise of dissolution lies in wait, pressure building low in her belly. In that one moment, she would rewrite history no matter what-- her climax swoops in like a runaway star, burning away the world._ _

__She’s still shaking a little from the aftershocks, still has her eyes closed while he presses a kiss onto her shoulder._ _

__“I could do this for you.”_ _

__The spell is broken. She sits up and begins putting on her clothes. One day she won’t feel a damn thing._ _

__She pushes the boy’s own clothes at him. “I’m going to check on my ship. Be gone by the time I come back.”_ _

__V._ _

__Mara might just be getting her bearings on this force bond business, but she’s pretty sure what she’s getting from Luke is boredom._ _

__The way the Councillor is drowning on and on, she’s sharing that with Luke even without the bond, so maybe it’s not the bond she’s reading. Who knows._ _

__At least when Karrde sent her to events, he’d expected her to do something other than be seen. It was Organa Solo’s idea to have them do what Mara has begun thinking as show and tells to accustom the populace to the idea of Galactic Hero and Jedi Master Luke Skywalker’s impending nuptials. This is the first--held scarcely a day after their return. If this is the tenor of all of them, she’s not sure how she’ll survive the rest._ _

__Finally, her patience gives. She’s not even truly a Jedi yet, so she’s under no obligation to endure the Councillor’s droning. Mara places a light hand on Luke’s white robed shoulder._ _

__“I think I see someone I know,” she says smoothly. She smiles lightly at the Councillor and bows her head. “If you’ll excuse me.”_ _

__Mara guesses what she’s getting is mild irritation? Juggling someone else’s emotions from this deep isn’t too different from getting blasted by a fire hose. On a good day, it’s like learning another language; Mara can maybe pick out a word or two. Maybe it’s better for Luke. She hasn’t asked._ _

__Dealing with the bond seemed much clearer when she’d been faced with impending death. After the endorphins of surviving through Nirauan had worn off, there’s been a strange numbness she can’t shake. By all counts, as a blushing bride she should be moving in a blissful haze._ _

__And she’s in a haze, all right._ _

Maybe it’s the _Fire_. Luke seems to think so. She still thinks about it sometimes. Wakes up at night thinking maybe it’ll be there waiting to take her to parts unknown. Tells herself that’s why she flinches every time he touches her. She made the right choice though. She always does when it matters. 

_Have you considered that perhaps you blame me?_

__Mara proceeds down the hall to the adjoining room--more like an alcove. The opening of the hall is the reason for the festivities and several moss paintings are set up as part of the exhibition. She hears the musicians begin to play in the main room. The guests walk out, leaving her alone._ _

__She stops by one of the moss paintings, a scene in green so dark it could be black, fire at the distance behind a hooded figure. She feels someone approach. The presence seems familiar._ _

__“Do you like it?”_ _

__“Kind of...dark,” she replies. “One of yours?”_ _

__The scholar bows his head. He looks like he did back in Abregado-rae, down to his usual blacks. “My collection, yes. Yours, if you want it.”_ _

__She laughs. “I can’t afford it.”_ _

__He tsks. “Really? Not even with the new family connections?”_ _

__Mara makes a face. She'd almost forgotten how fast the news are in the Core Worlds. “My fiancee wouldn’t like it either.”_ _

__“But do you like it?”_ _

__She takes a sip of her wine. “I guess not.”_ _

__Her answer seems to disappoint him._ _

__“I don’t like the ambiguity,” she finds herself saying. “That figure--is it causing the destruction? Is it just witnessing it? Is it fleeing from it?” She laughs suddenly. “I’m not much fond of Killik Twilight either.”_ _

__The scholar tilts his head. “It’s interesting. I would have never pegged you for a lover of certainty. I thought you favored...murk.”_ _

__She raises her eyebrows. “Murk?”_ _

__“Does he know?”_ _

__Immediately, she tenses, stretches into his mind, but it’s not a threat. There’s no malice, just curiosity._ _

__Mara looks down at her wine. The lights from above sparkle on the crimson surface. She thinks of blood under her fingernails, of scrubbing under the sanisteam so hard her skin felt raw, loving someone should make you better than you were, not--_ _

__It’s the barest touch at the back of her mind. The bond._ _

__The wine glass falls, shattering on the alabaster floor, red liquid splattering over both the hem of the scholar’s blacks and that of her own emerald green dress. Shards glint across the floor. Had she done that?_ _

__When she looks back up, the scholar is unruffled. His gaze is on her still as he waits for an answer._ _

__“My fiance.” Mara meets the scholar’s striking blue eyes. “Knows everything about me.”_ _


End file.
